Hi all,
I’m new with openSUSE and working with v 12.3 on VMWare virtual machine.
During installation I selected all the desktop environments and all the components as well. I have been working with the default KDE since I installed it. However, when I decided to try out a different one, I closed the current session then selected GNOME from the menu before logging in again. That was when disaster struck! The system loaded an empty desktop and that was it, no icons, no panels, no reaction to keyboard shortcuts, nothing! Just the bare desktop background staring at me. Of course restarting loads the previous session, and since I had selected auto-login at restart I keep getting the plain desktop each time I reboot. I’m locked out!!!
Please, how can I go about to get in again, and also, how do I get GNOME working?
If you did not try GNOME Shell before then you will notice that GNOME 3.X is a minimalistic desktop with “no icons” and a single panel at the top with a label “Activities” at top left hand side. you can get back the desktop icons by using tweak tool.
However, the “minimalistic” desktop I get hasn’t got any panel whatsoever and doesn’t react neither to left- nor right-clicking. I really don’t know why this might be.
Any other ideas would be great and really helpful!!
Thanks a lot for your help, but I’m still stuck with a blank screen which does not react to any keyboard shortcuts, not even to the cursor.
I was wondering, could the problem come from my virtual machine (VMware) installation of openSUSE?
Does anyone else have problems with the Gnome desktop environment with 12.3 installed on VMware Workstation 9?
I dont know for sure whether it was what I was supposed to do but when I selected “Advanced” from the boot menu I only got entries (four of them) listed as, "openSUSE 12.3 with linux… " but no recovery mode.
Meanwhile, (hope this will clarify my situation better) I tried every other desktop environment and they all loaded properly, except for the Gnome and Metacity desktops. Metacity responded in exactly the same way as Gnome: blank desktop, no response. So, I guess finally it’s not really a Gnome issue only. I have bigger problem but still have no idea what I can do about it.
2 of them should have “(recovery mode)” at the end.
Maybe your screen resolution is too low to see that?
Just choose the 2nd or 4th entry.
Meanwhile, (hope this will clarify my situation better) I tried every other desktop environment and they all loaded properly, except for the Gnome and Metacity desktops. Metacity responded in exactly the same way as Gnome: blank desktop, no response. So, I guess finally it’s not really a Gnome issue only. I have bigger problem but still have no idea what I can do about it.
Sounds like a video driver issue, exactly like GNOME behaves when you have an nvidia card and the nvidia driver is not working correctly.
Have you enabled “Accelerate 3D graphics” in VMWare? Maybe you have to install the VMWare tools first (inside the VM)?
AFAIK GNOME3 absolutely needs OpenGL/direct rendering support…
Thanks a lot for all your help. Still no breakthrough for me though.
I tried every one of the four entries listed in the “Advanced” boot menu but obtained the same unsatifactory result each time.
I checked and found out that Accelerate 3D Graphics was already enabled.
I think I had installed VMWare Tools upon installation of openSUSE, but since I was not so sure, I decided to install again (as re-installing won’t hurt).
However, I faced some issue during the installation process:
Enter the path to the kernel header files for the 3.7.10-1.1-desktop kernel?
The path "" is not a valid path to the 3.7.10-1.1-desktop kernel headers.
Would you like to change it? [yes]
Not knowing what a “valid” path would be I entered ‘No’, but I later got:
- This program could not find a valid path to the kernel headers of the running
kernel. Please ensure that the header files for the running kernel are
installed on this sytem.
Within the VM settings, make sure you have enabled 3d acceleration
After that, when you do a
Code:
glxinfo | grep "OpenGL render
it should return SVGA3D
The following is a snapshot of the output of “glxinfo | grep OpenGL” command:
Install the kernel development pattern from yast to your VM you need the kernel source to install the 3d tools I guess. At least the header files. Used to be you could just install the headers but now you are pretty much stuck installed the full source.
Please, is there some way to download the kernel development pattern then install offline? My Internet connection is wack, I can’t install anything directly using yast.
Another thing (sorry for the many questions I’m really a newbie!), when I’ve installed the development pattern what path do I enter as valid path to the 3.7.10-1.1-desktop kernel headers